THUMBSUCKER CUM ART.

Get your mind out of the gutter—that title has nothing to do with porn, it’s wirespeak for “an analysis piece with accompanying photographs.” Read all about it at Mike Feinsilber’s Writing Easy: Unearthing a Lost Language, an explication of “the jargon that Associated Press and its erstwhile strongest competitor in those days, United Press, independently devised for internal communications. Its purpose was to save time—and money.” It’s based on what sounds like an interesting book:

In 1997, four years before his death, hurrying before all this was lost, Richard Harnett, a retired reporter and bureau manager in San Francisco for 36 years, wrote and self-published Wirespeak: Codes and Jargon of the News Business. He printed 500 copies and figured he’d be lucky to sell half of them. This blogpost draws from Harnett’s work. His book is out of print, although Amazon lists used copies at three-figure prices.
I never met Harnett, the son of a traveling dry-goods salesman in North Dakota, but I uppicked the phone and interviewed him in 1997, the year his book was published. He said these codewords were used as much for esprit as for saving words. “If you could use them, it meant you were in the know,” he said.

There’s some history and a good story or two, and a comment with further details by Paul (who frequently comments here as well and who sent me the link). Outcheck soonest!
And speaking of porn, don’t miss Maev Kennedy’s Guardianpiece on the latest Bad Sex Award shortlist. In general that award tends to annoy me—it seems to me they seize on any attempt at literary writing, whether bad or not, and don’t really notice when a writer is deliberately being funny (as in the last nominee quoted, Nicholas Coleridge’s “In seconds the duke had lowered his trousers and boxers and positioned himself across a leather steamer trunk, emblazoned with the royal arms of Hohenzollern Castle. ‘Give me no quarter,’ he commanded. ‘Lay it on with all your might'”), but the Craig Raine quote that includes the phrase “Like a wubbering springboard” is so hilarious it justifies the existence of the award all by itself. (Thanks, Conrad!)

Comments

The counterpart of the thumbsucker is the goat-choker, a story so packed with facts and nothing but that nobody could possibly have the slightest interest in it. Academic papers like this have been called cow (euphemistic for cowshit, the opposite of bullshit).

Cablese was invented when it cost as much as 50 cents a word to send a message abroad by undersea cable. Cable companies permitted the combining of words—as long as they didn’t go beyond 15 letters. Thus “Tokyoward.” Thus “antiauthorities” for “against the authorities.”
Similarly, there’s the cablese use of the “un-” prefix to mean “(do) not” (as in “unknow” for “do not know”). More here.

And, of course, Evelyn Waugh in Abyssinia, told to investigate the story of a British nurse killed by bombing: “SEND TWO HUNDRED WORDS UPBLOWN NURSE”. The story, alas, turned out not to be true, and Waugh cabled back “NURSE UNUPBLOWN”.

“Upblown” might be pointless in another context, but not here: “dead nurse” could be anybody, but “upblown nurse” refers to a specific accident victim that the newspaper is aware of. Anyway it is the number of words that counts in a telegram, not the number of letters (up to a certain maximum).

There seems to be a lot of similarity between Wirespeak and Newspeak. Here’s Winston Smith getting started on a day’s work:
“Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon — not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words — which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:
times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling”

I like “doubleplusungood”. So much better than “catastrophic”.
I think “miniplenty” would have been a very useful euphemism for the Republican candidate to use in the recent campaign. Everyone lives in some kind of plenty!

JC: miniplenty : thanks for the correction! I read the book but that was quite some time ago. I thought that “miniplenty” meant something like ‘poverty’, as opposed for a potential word “maxiplenty” which would apply to the 1%. But I guess that “mini” and “maxi” were not used in Orwell’s time. I still think that those words would be quite useful!

And you can support my book habit without even spending money on me by following my Amazon links to do your shopping (if, of course, you like shopping on Amazon); I get a small percentage of every dollar spent while someone is following my referral links, and every month I get a gift certificate that allows me to buy a few books (or, if someone has bought a big-ticket item, even more). You will not only get your purchases, you will get my blessings and a karmic boost!

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(Cole's blog circa 2003)

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